Enter the Dragon’s Den

For those unfamiliar with the Canadian television series, The Dragon’s Den, it can perhaps best be described as American Inventor meets Reign of Fire. This CBC reality style program pits five rich investors against a variety of entrepenuers attempting to successfully solicit financial infusion for fame and fortune. Typically, as you might expect to see on a show such as this, the majority of pitches are ridiculed mercilessly and laughed off stage.

On the latest episode, which ran on November 5th, 2007, the Dragons made short work of a dog buiscuit baker, the inventor of a magnetic badminton fishing game, and a lady who somehow invested $40,000 of her own money into a small granite stone used to combat hot flashes. At this point, you may be wondering what this television show has to do with graphic design, and so you should.

Normally there is very little design-related content on the Dragons Den, save for a few token web 2.0 entries such as UniversityParty.ca, which was severely trashed on the show but actually seems fairly hip as far as social networking goes. Another design note is that one of the Dragons is Arlene Dickinson, the principal of Venture Communications in Calgary and owner of the cryptic website for Venture: openminds.ca. This site is as difficult to understand as it is to navigate and could have very well been a prime target for our Around Calgary section if it wasn’t for Arlene’s agreeable personality and obvious level of professional experience. We will trust her on this one.

This week was notable for one main reason. Dan Eisner from True North Mortgage was on the show. True North Mortgage is a Calgary based mortgage brokerage and also a client of ours. The poster displayed during the pitch was designed by your friends at Elbowroom Design! We were excited to see our work on TV as this is the closest we’ve come to our fifteen minutes of fame. First and foremost though, we were excited to see Dan have all of his hard work pay-off in the form of an investment offer from the Dragons.